The third mode, ‘community’, has its roots in
normative activist discourses of the 1960s and 1970s
(Dunn 1978; Lovins 1977). Through a community
approach, it was argued, energy hardware and
software configurations could be radically different
– smaller-scale, locally appropriate, environmentally
and socially benign. Such perspectives were brought
into the mainstream of energy policy in the early
2000s, largely for instrumental rather than normative
reasons, but drawing on a neo-communitarian
discourse of local participation and empowerment
(Walker et al. 2007a)